Mdear Esther,
The last time I wrote I was full of doubts. I talked about fires in relationships that I enjoy setting (letter published in April), I was sorry for not being able to get back to normality. I emerged from the stormy affair with my colleague (and his brother) and blamed myself for being a virago, a fury, a bitch.
In your response you wisely invited me to take advantage of what the world has to offer, that there is always time for normality (I kept the quote from the corpse enemy). Even more wisely you advised me to learn to distinguish between love that is enough and that which is not.
Single, perhaps, is better
Strangely enough, shortly after I found myself at live a normal relationship with a foreigner. We know each other, we like each other, we hang out. Saturday night pizzas are arriving. It will be there Little Quiet Love?
I don’t know, instead I become eager, I see conspiracies (i.e. horns) everywhere. I smell burning, he’s hiding something from me, too many silences when we are not together. Will it be the Nordic character or the straw tail? Friends try to calm my hot spirits.
However, the great thing about jealous sufferers is that they are the first cheaters. I have a platonic friendship with a colleague, which remains platonic but not too innocent.
Months pass, there story seems to be getting serious. I start to think about life as a couple, I inform the family. His silences, however, don’t convince me. And indeed a beautiful day finally he confesses to me that he is not ready for a serious relationship, and that he wasn’t even when he was supposed to get married to the girl before me. An endless monologue follows about his frailties (he is indecisive, insecure, he was bullied at school and at thirty years old he still thinks about it, and other pains). The century of sorrow has also arrived in autonomous Northern Europe. Any trauma to avoid admitting that you don’t do things because they just don’t suit you.
I didn’t make him pay as usual, at most I made myself unavailable when he came back to look for me. I’ve at least learned to economise on attention.
But a world has opened up to me, and it seems like I’m no longer the same.
That single relief
When he left I felt nothing but relief. I felt relief in having been right in my doubts, relief in not having brought such an unresolute person into my house. I just made a major career change and how nice it is to be able to focus on work and the endless money and time problems I already have without a man around.
I told myself that Maybe I’m too jealous and tend to be unfaithful to be able to be as a couple. Having to work to keep a couple together, especially if the other is a sentimental illiterate, terrifies me. It’s not for me, and thank God I figured that out before I was thirty. I want love, I like emotions, but maybe it’s better for everyone to go back to their own homes afterwards.
Marriage is no longer a goal
Why have we made sure that the couple and marriage are the ultimate goal? It was for our grandmothers in fifth grade, but what about us? I see older friends with careers, money and success getting worried because they haven’t started a family yet, and I don’t know how to save them from this collective obsession. Everywhere women are depressed, anxious, full of fear because in their opinion they didn’t make it to win the prize. Run away, do as you please, save yourselves.
Why don’t we think about feeling good as should be natural for everyone, instead of forcing ourselves to wear a 38 when wearing a 41?
I humbly ask for answers.
A hug full of relief,
L.
Ester Viola’s response
Dear L.,
What answers are you finding? Yours is already a whole letter of answers. Very rare rarity – and what a relief, every now and then.
No one spares you the tour of the chapels from twenty to thirty-five: great love that goes into an unhappy decline because it could only decrease, small love that slowly grows stronger and then after all the effort you put in, it too gives up, inexorably and against logic. , unrequited love at all, love requited at the minimum that you waste 10 years to see if you can make it in the end, love-passion-oh-god-the-chemistry, then the chemistry ends too, only cerebral love, platonic love, love hopping, love chatting. It seems to me that the final division, if ever one day we were lucky enough to be able to afford one, will only be between love that lasts and love that doesn’t last. The rest matters little, we will admit.
What is certain is that you are left hurt and disappointed and without strength in ways you didn’t think possible. We didn’t foresee them. “Sufferings are never ordered in their progression; in that case there would be no real suffering” wrote Philip Roth.
Single? That’s fine
Who knows what we wanted. In fact I know, of course I know what we wanted, every time: guarantees applied in the fog, our title blocked and always very high on the exchange of relationships. “Put me in a happy couple forever” – a modest request, to be sure. What would be missing from there to happiness? Nothing.
And instead they give us trouble. It’s a sense of disorientation worse than loneliness, what you sometimes feel in a couple: sometimes you can call it tiredness, sometimes it’s “who made me do it?”, still others it’s “I would be happier with (individual choice among former or new acquaintances)”. It is the most fragile construction in the world, the couple.
You discover it, at a certain point, and you say okay, then I’ll do without it, I’ll be fine. But then the “I will never be happy with anyone again” doesn’t come true. She falls in love all the time. And unfortunately, I might add, because one could also dedicate oneself to something else.
Think more about yourself
You write to me, speaking in general about the rest of us: Why have we made sure that the couple and marriage are the ultimate goal? It was for our grandmothers in fifth grade, but what about us? I see older friends with careers, money and success getting worried because they haven’t started a family yet, and I don’t know how to save them from this collective obsession. Everywhere women are depressed, anxious, full of fear because in their opinion they didn’t make it to win the prize.
I am with you. I keep the point, all the same. But I have to warn you that I’m starting to meet the others too. Those who tell you: but why didn’t I think more about myself? It is the only feminist revolution that would be needed, equality is also (primarily) an internal issue. And we’re realizing it, we’re almost there.
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